In the unforgiving deserts of south west Algeria, Nick Ryan meets the nomads fighting a 25 year battle.

To the French legionnaires, it was simply "Le
Vent du Sable". The Spanish conquistadors before them named it "La Siroco",
and marvelled at the strange crystalline shapes it left in its wake. But
neither of these conveys a true impression of the furious, burning wind
which boils over the landscape below, as the plane rocks through the storm
clouds, down into the Western Sahara.

Beneath the howling clouds of dust, 120,000 men face each other across
the dark featureless sand. Thousands of miles from any major civilisation,
and under temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius, the two armies are
preparing for war. On one side, there are over 100,000 heavily armed conscripts,
drafted from coastal cities and temperate mountain valleys, waiting behind
a huge, fortified, rubble wall. This wall runs for nearly 1500 kilometres,
is surrounded by razor wire, minefields and forts and costs nearly $2
million per day to maintain and protect. On the other, there are less
than 20,000 lightly armed and highly mobile guerrillas, swarthy desert
nomads who have fought their more numerous opponents to a standstill,
in a bloody 24 year war.

The stony Hamada desert in south-western Algeria may seem an unlikely
setting for the UN's second longest unresolved conflict (and Africa's
last decolonial war). There's no running water; sudden rainfall turns
the area into a floodbowl, sweeping everything in its path; stinging sandstorms
scour the desert floor; and even livestock have a hard time finding sustenance
among the few plants hardy enough to grow in the bleak, flat landscape.
Yet everything in this arena is touched by war. From hundreds of thousands
of refugees, to unacknowledged prisoners, torture, disappearances, and
thunderous military parades in the desert heat, war is all around you.

"It was the worst conditions," the figure says, pinching the ridge of
his nose with cracked, pitted fingers, and bowing his head for a moment.
"We went by feet, without water or cars. I had to leave my mother and
brothers in the city behind me. There were people dying all around us,
as we were chased by the Moroccans in the north, and the Mauritanians
to the south. Many, many of my friends were killed." H mmad Ali is a slight,
wiry figure, a tiny part of his angular, leather-like face just visible
through his black "chech" (headscarf). Seemingly older than his 41 years,
he fled his native LaYounne city in the Western Sahara when Moroccan troops
entered the province in 1975. "It was hard," says Ali, picking his brown,
tannin-stained teeth with a traditional "meshwar" (cleaning stick). "Too
hard. But now we have a strong army," he says, brightening, and pointing
out of the Algerian army tent towards the horizon. "We will fight anyone
trying to take our land. It is like a mother to us, not for the soldiers
who have to be paid to come here."

Like many other Sahawaris - the curious mix of Arab, Berber and black
African nomads who are native to this region - Ali has stories of the
"martyrs" from his family who have fallen in the struggle against King
Hassan II's Morocco. The Moroccans entered the province in 1975, sending
350,000 volunteers bearing the Koran over the border, in what became known
as "The Green March".

Hassan's regime was weak, beset by food riots and assassination attempts,
and many critics have since argued that the Western Sahara offered him
a useful distraction. The nationalist Istiqlal party, which had won Morocco's
independence from France, maintained that a 'Greater Morocco' had encompassed
parts of Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and the Western Sahara since the 13th
century. And when the Green Marchers quickly withdrew, the Moroccan army
moved into their place.

The war which followed was vicious and bloody, sending nearly 170,000
refugees across the desert, under aerial bombardment, to refugee camps
in Algeria. Four camps were created under the control of the Polisario
Front, the Sahawaris' national liberation movement, which had been created
two years earlier to overthrow Spanish colonial rule. Algeria effectively
ceded control of the region (near the military town of Tindouf) to Polisario,
allowing it to be run as a semi-autonomous province. The self-styled Sahawari
Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) is now recognised by some 70 regimes,
including other famous liberation movements such as the PLO. Those 65,000
or so Sahawaris that remained in the Western Sahara were either bombed,
or subject to harsh political repression in the cities and towns.

In fact, the Moroccans had been invited in by Spain, as it lay in the
dying throes of the Franco regime (with Franco himself on his deathbed).
It handed over the area to Morocco and Mauritania, allowing them to lay
their hands on the region's huge phosphate reserves, and the world's richest
fishing grounds which lay off its shores - just 100kms from the Canary
Islands.

The war was characterised by Polisario's hit-and-run guerrilla t ctics,
using highly mobile, heavily armed jeeps. At one time, it was so successful
that it mounted attacks on the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, leading
to the collapse of the government there. However, the main war with Morocco
ended in a stalemate, finally grinding to a halt under a UN-brokered ceasefire
in 1991.

It had left thousands of dead on both sides, though no-one knows the
exact figures. One Sahawari elder told me "ten dead" in his own family,
his voice dry with age as he squatted on a large, Persian-style rug, drinking
sweet, frothy tea and reminiscing of his own battles with French and Spanish
troops earlier in the century. My interpreter, Said Mohammed Salem, a
handsome man in his thirties, added that he remembered his old neighbourhood
and friends lost, with sadness. "You cannot know, you cannot calculate,
unless you have been there," he says.

The war also left some 2,000 Moroccan prisoners in Polisario's hands,
plus a huge amount of captured equipment. However, Morocco has constructed
several "walls", or berms - made of fortified rubble and minefields, and
protected by artillery - around four-fifths of the territory (about twice
the size of England) hemming the Sahawaris into their "Liberated Zone".
The Wall remains a vast drain on Moroccan resources, costing nearly $2
million per day, although during the earlier part of the war it received
substantial military aid from both France and the US.

Under the UN's plan, the two sides were supposed to agree to a referendum
on the area's future; simply, did the Sahawaris want to live under Moroccan
control or as a separate nation? But the plans have run into trouble time
and again, despite two visits from UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, who
has staked his personal credibility on solving the problem, and firefighting
by his special representative, former US Secretary of State James Baker.

For years the UN operation drifted as both sides stalled, and became
a byword for inefficiency to a hostile US Congress, not least because
of the escalating $400 million cost of its MINURSO (United Nations Mission
for the Referendum in the Western Sahara) peacekeeping force. Even President
Clinton has lent his weight to the dispute, writing to a Republican Representative
that "recent progress...lends hope that this crucial issue will soon be
resolved."

The referendum was eventually supposed to take place last December,
but has now been postponed again until this December. Morocco and Polisario
have spent months wrangling over exactly how many Sahawaris should be
eligible to vote. Morocco has continually argued for extra voters to be
added to the last available census figures, taken by the Spanish in 1974
(which said there were 74,000 Sahawaris in the territory). Polisario maintains
that the Moroccans have simply been flooding the territory with impoverished
Moroccans from further north, using economic incentives, in order to 'spoil'
the vote in its favour.

The UN finally finished sifting through 147,000 possible voters last
September. Polisario had originally argued that only 85,000 of these were
eligible. In fact, it climbed down two months later and allowed the scrutiny
of a further 65,000 potential electors - which has left King Hassan's
Moroccan government uncomfortably exposed and without further excuse for
progress towards the referendum vote.

"Now that we are saying 'yes', the Moroccans have been left without
any excuses," a Sahawari official told me. The UN Security Council has
now voted to limit its mandate to the end of March only - seen as a sign
of international impatience with the Moroccan regime, which many doubt
can afford a return to war.

Yet the Sahawaris do not seem intimidated by the possibility of war,
nor the superior firepower ranged against them. During 10 days with Polisario,
I watched a huge military parade of their captured equipment, including
tanks, surface-to-air missiles and several thousand men (including a company
of frogmen!). Howitzers sent thunderous streaks of fire arcing across
the desert, causing the various dignitaries to wince and cover their ears,
and reminding me, incongruously, of Soviet military parades during the
1970s and 80s.

During one siesta, when the desert is too hot even for the Sahawaris,
I found myself talking to a young soldier just back from the front line.
Sitting in the single room of his family's mud-baked hut, 18-year-old
Cheh told me how he was serving in the radio battalion. He was on short
term leave and proudly declared, with a wide grin, that he came from LaYounne
city - even though, like 60 percent of all Sahawaris, he wouldn't have
been born when the Moroccans invaded.

"Life is hard," he says. "But we have enough to eat and drink, praise
God." His skin is baked black by the sun, and he lounges on the ornate
rugs (which furnish every dwelling), smoking the ubiquitous traditional
tobacco pipe. In between listening to a Walkman, he tells me of the five
brothers and sisters in his family, and how "life in the desert is tough
- tougher than here. But I'm going back to my home soon." How, I casually
ask? "In a big truck," he says quite literally, causing myself and Said
to crack up with laughter.

But for most Sahawaris, this is not a joke. I met scores of young women
training with AK-47 automatic weapons in a military training school. Ostensibly
policewomen, the sign above their training ground read "Independence,
Independence, Independence - by Peace or Killing." Wearing khaki uniforms,
their faces stained blue by the dye in their shortened black "malaafas",
which cover their head and shoulders, they told me they remained ready
to die for their country. "We want a just referendum," one young woman
told me. "If it is free and fair, we will have our country back. If not..."
she said, and let the sentence trail off, before returning to stripping
down her weapon. It is a sobering thought, even in the dead heat.

Ahmed Fal, commander of the Second Military Region, stationed on the
pinkish sand near the Moroccan wall, also told me: "We are a peace-loving
people. But when it is a question of dignity and sovereignty and our own
land, we have no option. If there is no choice we will go back to war.
We are ready."

The Sahawaris are really one of history's forgotten peoples, a sprawling
nomadic collection of tribes, formed by waves of conquest and migration
across north Africa. Their most direct descendants are believed to be
13th century Arabs from Yemen, who collided and intermarried with Berbers
and black Africans. Today the Sahawaris speak one of the purest forms
of Arabic, called Hassaniya, and are Sunni muslims, worshipping without
mosques. Although originally nomadic, many had settled into cities by
the 1960s, making life in the Algerian desert even more difficult.

Any visitor to these fragile-looking settlements cannot help but be
impressed by the organisation and achievements which have taken place
over the past two decades. Literacy has risen from five to 95 percent;
healthcare and education are free to all, with underground hospitals operating
right under the Moroccans' noses; many young Sahawaris go on to study
at universities in countries such as France, Spain, Libya, Algeria and
Cuba; and desert "gardens" help provide essential fruit and vegetables
to the refugees' mineral-poor diet.

I am taken on a tour of these projects, rattling across the blackened
desert in a seemingly random direction, watching other jeeps criss-cross
the roadless expanse in the distance. Occasionally passing a roadblock
- when there is a road - manned by young Sahawari conscripts, my first
visit is to one of the gardens which have been carved into the inhospitable
environment.

The Sahawari in charge, Said Mohammed Galoui, greets me, his taped spectacles
perched precariously across his nose. As he proudly shows me around the
walled expanse, he points out fig trees, dates, onions, beetroot, carrots
and even peppers, which are fed by underground boreholes. There's a chicken
shed too, supplying thousands of eggs. The ground is saline and tons of
fresh water must be pumped up to constantly wash the sandy soil, some
of which itself has to be imported. Moroccan prisoners of war also work
the land, although to the casual eye remain almost indistinguishable from
the Sahawaris around them. One smiling, portly prisoner tells me he's
from Casablanca. I laugh, thinking he's a Sahawari making a joke - but
then see he's deadly serious.

Galoui, a tall, sprightly man, remembers working as a farmer under Spanish
colonial rule in Western Sahara - and is already making plans to each
others his skills upon their return. He admits, though, that the gardens
can only provide a fraction, however impressive, of the Sahawaris' nutritional
needs. Ninety percent or more still has to come in from outside, the majority
of it supplied once a month by the Algerian Red Crescent (Polisario supplements
this with distributions of camel meat, and each family also keeps goats
and other livestock). Water is scarce, and drilling crews constantly scour
the desert for new sources. Malnutrition, particularly among children,
remains high. Next we visit a hospital, named after one of the Sahawari
fallen, Martyr Harya Haidara. It's barely up to modern western standards,
but is still an impressive achievement out here in the middle of this
harsh desert. Sand creeps over the concrete floor, and a single wan electric
light battles vainly with the shadows which lurk all over, in corners
and in the high rafters overhead.

I chat with a tired but pleasant young doctor, a slim, dark-skinned
Sahawari who was trained in Cuba (as were many of his contemporaries,
women as well as men). He tells me, on a walkabout, that the hospital
has 74 beds and three doctors. However, they lack 80 percent of all necessary
drugs and equipment, and only outside aid from NGOs keeps them going.
He also adds that all instruments have to be sterilised by boiling in
water, sometimes bleach. Without X-rays, the doctors can sometimes only
guess what is wrong with a patient.

They treat many eye problems, as well as diabetes, heart disease and
outbreaks of cholera, he says, which are caused when sewage leaks into
and infects boreholes. An older, fatter doctor - Mohammed Salem Deiya
- explains that one of their main problems is getting people to trust
in modern, not traditional medicine. He says he was an assistant to a
Spanish doctor when Spain ruled Western Sahara, and that there was just
one pharmaceutical assistant for 30,000 Sahawaris. "At least that has
now changed," he says.

During the early years in the camps, life was particularly hard. Since
the men were at the front, the burden of running them fell upon women,
which has wrought changes on the Muslim society. One visitor at this time
wrote: "The depression felt when visiting these camps is as great as the
admiration it arouses. It is depressing because of the misery and the
malnutrition, which hits the children in particular. There is a lack of
essential medicines and medical equipment. Many families have arrived
with little more than the clothes on their backs. The enormous variations
in temperature between night and day and the sandstorms are gradually
eroding whatever the refugees were able to bring."

Now it is the women who run the tents, fetch the water, raise the children
and - in many cases - also hold down jobs as nurses, doctors, administrators
and teachers. It is they who keep everything s clean, and conserve the
scarce resources. For example, a corner of each tent is converted to a
wash area, with a pewter-style bowl and kettle. As one member pours the
water, another washes, and the water is collected in the bowl and recycled
for later use.

During one evening I sit with Fatma, a light-skinned 28-year-old Sahawari
woman. Wearing a pink coloured malaafa which she wraps around her head
and body, I watch her make tea on a small portable stove. Fatma is typical
of the new breed of Sahawari women - highly educated, a director of a
school, divorced and free to remarry as she chooses (part of traditional
Sahawari heritage, and reason for concern among some other Muslim nations).

"We have one woman on the National Secretariat," she says, pouring the
sweet, mint tea high into each glass and allowing it to collect froth,
before serving the traditional three rounds. "But that's not enough. Many
years ago, before the revolution, the women's job was very limited - just
to deal with her family and tent." As one of her small children runs around
beside us, and a radio blares out a mixture of static and Arabic pop music,
she tells me that the women played an important role when Polisario was
launched in 1973. "They were underground Polisario members, working with
different groups and making flags. And the Sahawari women took the place
of the men in the camps when they went to fight, dealing with administration
and at the same time nursing, teaching, playing several roles. As a result,
our society has changed completely."

Her comments are echoed by Maryam Hmada, who runs a women-only training
college in the camps. Widowed and then divorced, the 32-year-old says:
"It's too late to change our role. It's going to be impossible to bring
us back to the kitchen."

But it would be a mistake to think that Sahawaris were somehow divided.
Everyone in this environment shares hardships together. The 101 member
parliament-in-exile, with its various ministries (including 10 tribal
elders, the rest elected) and President Mohammed Abdelaziz, all live in
tents and - apart from sharing a habit for chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes
- all have also fought in battles together. In fact, Abdelaziz is famous
for his exploits on the battlefield. Although he himself admits, at a
'press conference' held for visiting journalists in a Beau-Geste style
fort, that Polisario used to be Communist, he also claims that it has
never received a Soviet bullet.

"We all have the same will for our revolution and country, to live like
all other dignified peoples in the world," says a member of the SADR embassy
in Algiers. "There was no other way to an armed struggle," he adds. "We
have a proverb here; the sun cannot be covered by a net. You can't cover
up what we are. We will build a democratic system when we return to Western
Sahara. This is the kind of state we want." It remains to be seen whether
the UN will actually withdraw its presence, or whether some form of compromise
will be found at the eleventh hour. However, the Sahawaris are certainly
pushing for some form of resolution. As their most famous singer, Umm
Deleila, said to Mr Annan during his most recent visit: "We have given
blood, the dearest thing that every human has - so we are sure that we
will receive something in return." This is certainly not the last chapter
in this tragic, yet forgotten, conflict.